On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups , our guest is Dr. Cody Friesen, the founder and CEO of Source Global, a sustainability-focused startup that is working to help solve the planet’s drinking water scarcity issues. The company’s flagship product is the Source Hydropanel, a solar-powered, self-contained piece of technology that turns the plentiful water vapor in the atmosphere into a clean, renewable water supply. Source Global has done both commercial and residential projects in more than...
Mar 16, 2023•30 min
On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups , our guest is Camila Lecaros , the Managing Director of MassChallenge Mexico , a start-up accelerator that is part of a global network with other outposts in Boston, Texas, Israel, and Switzerland. MassChallenge uses a relatively unique model in its work with budding entrepreneurs. It takes no equity in the start-ups it helps get off the ground over an intensive, 3-4 month program; its offering is completely free to the very early stage companies that ...
Feb 16, 2023•23 min
On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups , we talk to Adeyemi Ajao, the cofounder and Managing Partner at Base 10 Partners. The San Francisco-based VC firm focuses on startups bringing automation technology to a variety of sectors in what it calls the Real Economy, including logistics, retail, healthcare, finance, and food. Its investments have included Nubank, Instacart, Figma, and Rappi. While Ade and his co-founder TJ Nahigian take a particular, data-driven approach to choosing their invest...
Jan 26, 2023•33 min
On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups , we talk to Gautam Nadella, an operating partner at EQT Ventures in the Bay Area, where he drives M&A, fundraising, and partnership efforts within their portfolio of more than 100 companies. EQT invests in a wide range of companies in both Europe and the US; in November of last year, it closed what it described as Europe’s largest VC fund committed to early-stage tech startups, with commitments of 1 billion euros, putting its total raise since laun...
Jan 12, 2023•23 min
In recent years, the pressure from investors on already successful start-ups to keep growing faster and faster has been intense. Reaching a $100 million valuation, a notable achievement in its own right, left little time to celebrate; the venture capital (VC) firms that invest in these companies expect their value to reach $1 billion or more—and to do so quickly. Yet less than one in ten manage this feat in under four years.Earlier this year, a McKinsey team featuring Kim Baroudy, Giacomo Dolci,...
Dec 15, 2022•30 min
It wasn’t very long ago that venture capital was so free-flowing it seemed as if any entrepreneur with a half-decent idea could raise an initial round of financing. Those halcyon days are clearly now past us, with inflation, rising interest rates, and slowing economic growth (or full-fledged recession) ushering in a radically different macro funding environment. VCs, angels, and other early-stage investors are much pickier about what new companies they will support, as a renewed focus on profita...
Dec 01, 2022•32 min
Today’s McKinsey on Startups guest is Yada Piyajomkwan, cofounder and Chief Product Officer of Indonesian digital investing unicorn Ajaib. It was only a few years ago that Yada and her fellow Stanford MBA, Anderson Sumarli (now CEO), launched Ajaib with the goal of bringing investing to the masses in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country. Until recently, stock and mutual fund investing there were primarily reserved for a very small elite, roughly 1 to 2 percent of the entire popula...
Nov 17, 2022•22 min
Today’s McKinsey on Startups guest is Meirav Oren , the co-founder and CEO of Versatile, a startup that is working to bring the power of AI to the construction job site. Founded in Oren’s native Israel back in 2016 along with Danny Hermann, Barak Cohen and Ran Oren, and now headquartered in Silicon Valley, Versatile has won plaudits in the construction and investment community with its first product, CraneView, which the company rolled out just as the pandemic was starting in early 2020. As the ...
Nov 03, 2022•24 min
It’s no secret that plant-based foods and alternative meats have been soaring in popularity in recent years. On today’s McKinsey on Startups podcast, we learn more about this dynamic entrepreneurial sector in a guest episode from The Venture , the podcast on business building from Leap by McKinsey. Earlier this year, McKinsey’s Andrew Roth spoke to Eat Just CEO and cofounder Josh Tetrick. Founded in 2011, Eat Just has been a pioneer in the sector, producing eggs using mung beans and cultivated m...
Oct 20, 2022•38 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 27:29) > On this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, our guest is Mike Packer, a partner at QED Investors, a boutique venture capital firm focused on the fast-growing fintech sector. QED was co-founded by Frank Rotman and Nigel Morris, who was one of the co-founders of Capital One, and QED has taken a similar, data-centric strategic approach to its investing in the next generation of financial services disruptors. With more than $3 billion under m...
Oct 06, 2022•28 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 30:43) > On this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we speak with Lluís Cañadell, the co-founder and CEO of Treinta, a Colombia-based fintech startup focused on helping Latin American microbusinesses transition into the digital era. Across Latin America, there are some 50 million micro-merchants or microbusinesses, typically sole proprietors or those with less than 10 employees, the vast majority of which are still relying on pen and paper for re...
Sep 22, 2022•31 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 30:44) > On this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we talk to David Berry, the founder and CEO of Valo Health, a human data-driven startup hoping to fundamentally alter the drug discovery and development process. Berry, a serial entrepreneur who has founded more than 30 companies (five of which are publicly traded), believes the industry’s longtime approach to generating new drugs is too costly, slow, and ineffective to keep pace in the battle a...
Sep 08, 2022•31 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 26:15) > Since the pandemic began, educational technology (or edtech) and remote schooling have gained traction. Growing numbers of students and adults were initially forced to rely on virtual classes and teaching, and since then many have chosen to stick with this relatively new method of learning. In this back-to-school guest episode from the McKinsey Israel on High Tech podcast, senior partner Andrew Goodman and Aviel Lazar of edtech company ...
Aug 25, 2022•26 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 37:13) > Chris Herd is the co-founder and CEO of Firstbase, a remote-work infrastructure provider that helps both new ventures and large established companies onboard and serve their growing ranks of employees no longer venturing into the office. Chris and cofounder and CTO Trey Bastian actually launched Firstbase a year before the pandemic fueled the rise of remote work; as they were attempting to get their fintech startup off the ground, they ...
Aug 11, 2022•37 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 31:17) > Itamar Zur is the cofounder and CEO of Veho, a next-generation logistics startup that is out to reinvent the delivery experience for e-commerce brands and their customers. In just two years, Veho’s delivery and return logistics platform has grown to 900 employees and is on track to be operating in 50 US markets by the end of year. Earlier this year, only a few months after its Series A raise of $125 million, Veho raised another $170 mil...
Jul 28, 2022•31 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 27:51) > Ilan Gur is the founder and CEO of Activate, an innovative non-profit organization that offers two-year entrepreneurial fellowships to scientists to try to bridge the gap in the US innovation ecosystem between the research lab and the startup world. Activate offers a wide range of resources, knowledge and networks to its fellows so they can begin to turn their cutting-edge ideas and technologies into real-world practical solutions, and ...
Jul 14, 2022•28 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 23:52) > In two recent McKinsey on Start-ups special guest episodes, we examined the emerging contours of the metaverse. Today we are pleased to feature the third and concluding episode in the special three-part series from At the Edge, the new podcast from McKinsey’s Technology Council. McKinsey senior expert Richard Ward talks to Mina Alaghband about a number of near-term metaverse use cases in the industrial, consumer goods and retail sectors...
Jun 30, 2022•24 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 24:32) > Once primarily focused on execution and on-time delivery, product manager roles have been heavily transformed. They are now expected to serve as a mini-CEO, acting as the glue that binds the many functions that touch a product, from engineering, design, and customer success, to sales, marketing, operations, and finance. And amid growing societal concerns about responsible stewardship, product managers are having to incorporate privacy, ...
Jun 16, 2022•25 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 18:08) > Back in April, McKinsey on Start-ups featured a special guest episode exploring the meaning and potential impact of the metaverse with tech futurist and advisor Cathy Hackl. The episode was the first in a three-part series from At the Edge, the new podcast from McKinsey’s Technology Council. Today, we are pleased to feature the second episode, with noted metaverse investor and author Matthew Ball. In his discussion with McKinsey’s Mina ...
Jun 02, 2022•18 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 33:46) > Adrien Nussenbaum, cofounder and co-CEO of Mirakl, joins McKinsey executive editor Daniel Eisenberg on this episode. Mirakl, the leading SaaS platform provider in the rapidly growing enterprise marketplace sector, was started in France about a decade ago by Nussenbaum and cofounder and CEO Philippe Corrot, who had sold their previous start-up, a digital gaming marketplace, to French retailer Fnac. The company helps both B2C and B2B comp...
May 19, 2022•34 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 26:21) > Apps that aim to provide on-demand emotional, mental or spiritual support have soared in popularity in the last few years, some explicitly religious, others tied to meditation, psychotherapy or mindfulness. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the stressful world we live in, especially more than two years into the pandemic, when many people haven’t been able to regularly seek out their normal refuges in person. One startup helping f...
May 05, 2022•26 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 20:14) > For all the often-breathless talk in the tech sector these days about the metaverse, no one quite agrees on how to precisely define it. But there seems to be a growing consensus that whatever it is exactly – virtual and augmented reality on steroids, the convergence of our physical and digital identities -- it is poised to become a major factor in both our personal and professional lives. In this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we beg...
Apr 21, 2022•20 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 39:00) > Based on demographics alone, Pakistan is a country whose start-up ecosystem should have been thriving for quite a while. It has, for starters, the fifth largest population in the world, approaching 230 million. And that population is both overwhelmingly young, with a median age of 22, and bi-lingual, with the fourth largest number of English speakers in the world. Add to that one of the fastest-growing middle classes, more than 100 mill...
Apr 07, 2022•39 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 40:24) > Deidre Paknad, co-founder and CEO of Workboard, is the guest on this episode of the podcast. Workboard is a leading platform provider in the fast-growing space of OKR software, a sub-category of enterprise planning software that helps customers manage and track their progress on Objectives and Key Results, the increasingly ubiquitous corporate planning method invented by Intel and popularized by Google. Paknad is a seasoned Silicon Vall...
Mar 10, 2022•40 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 30:46) > In the past two decades, as technology and startups have radically reshaped our daily lives and the global economy, Europe could be forgiven for wondering if this new moment might pass it by. While still a global economic power, Europe’s relative lack of innovation and entrepreneurial success has become a major source of concern as it contemplates its future economic and technological competitiveness. In just the last few years, however...
Feb 24, 2022•31 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 29:37) > It is no secret that the pandemic has fueled a boom in food delivery, but it isn’t just the sheer volume of orders that is soaring. The speed with which groceries or other household products can arrive at your door has really taken off, as a number of well-funded start-ups in the quick- or q-commerce space promise to deliver within just 10 or 15 minutes. One such leading player is Getir, which started in Turkey back in 2015 but now offe...
Feb 11, 2022•30 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 37:19) > Cybersecurity has become so challenging and complex that the work of protecting against vulnerabilities is increasingly starting earlier, when developers are first building software and applications. This move to developer-first security is an extension of the broader shift known as DevOps, now practically the industry standard, in which the once siloed worlds of development and operations work together to build and iterate at a much fa...
Jan 27, 2022•37 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 35:25) > Any number of companies and industries have been upended by the pandemic of the past two years, but few consumer sectors have been more radically reshaped than food delivery. At the outset of COVID, lockdowns and physical-distancing requirements gave the category an enormous boost, as delivery became a lifeline for the ailing restaurant industry. Two years later, food delivery has gone from a steadily-growing but still small piece of th...
Jan 13, 2022•35 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 26:25) > Over the last decade, the rise of software-as-a-service (or SaaS) has dramatically transformed the software industry and the myriad enterprises it serves. As the pace of digital transformation and growth of cloud computing has accelerated, SaaS has rapidly become the software-delivery model of choice and preferred alternative to legacy, on-premise products. This paradigm shift to an on-demand, subscription-based model opens up a number ...
Dec 16, 2021•26 min
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 37:48) > When it comes to start-up fundraising these days, new records seem to be broken practically every quarter. But few digital sectors are booming as much as the business of money known as fintech. Globally, the industry raised more than $90 billion in funding in the first three quarters of this year, almost double the pace in 2020, with 42 new fintech unicorns minted in the third quarter alone. Helping fuel this massive growth is the desir...
Dec 03, 2021•38 min
